On December 30, 2004 02:57 am, Shawn wrote:
<snip>
> (My appologies for the quasi rant. I've just spent the past few days going
> through the same type of effort trying to get Drupal running - especially
> the navigation "features". Lots of documentation, but little of it for the
> current version which does things differently, or the docs assume other
> prerequisites are in place, but don't really explain what they are... Its
> crap like this that makes me really doubt open source - or my own skills.)
Actually, this is not really systemic to open source but the software industry
in general. What kind of documentation came with any install of windows?
How about MS Office? Of course you can buy the documentation from the MS
press or a 3rd party.
We often take it for granted when we are familiar with a given system. I am
experiencing the same level of frustration as you as I am now managing a
couple of windows networks. This is after having abandoned that platform for
a couple of years. Before I get to smug about oss I have to remind myself
that I too found oss frustrating at one point when I was initially using it.
This was also true when I was an apple/ Mac user (long time ago), though to a
lesser degree.
One challenge for oss is the variety of platforms. Within linux itself there
are quite a variety of distros, I personally use debian and Slackware, and
have been less than impressed with SuSe, Red Hat/Fedora and Gentoo (this is
not a comment on the overall quality of these distros, merely their
suitability to my needs)
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